Monterey County youth arrests down, but incarceration up

Data show downward trends nationally

Local residents numbed by headlines about youth violence might not believe it, but juvenile crime is on the decline.

Nationwide, in California, and even in Monterey County, arrest data show youth crime has reached an all-time low.

Yet despite making fewer youth arrests, Monterey County has incarcerated minors at the highest rate of any large county in the state, a new online "data mapping" system shows.

The web-based tool for tracking juvenile crime trends was unveiled this week by the nonprofit Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, and it reveals that the crime trend heralded as good news in the rest of the nation is a mixed bag in Monterey County.

"Our count in Juvenile Hall in recent months has been consistently lower than our historical average," said Monterey County Probation Chief Manuel Real.

"But we are still confronted with a higher-than-average youth violence rate in our county, which may account for the higher rate of youngsters in DJJ," he said, referring the Division of Juvenile Justice, which operates the state's prisons for youths.

In 2009 and 2010, the two most recent years measured in state data collections, the county's juvenile arrest rate dropped, as it did in the rest of California.

State Department of Justice data show that even as Monterey County's population grew, youth felony arrests fell steadily from 824 in 2001 to 624 in 2010.

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But the county's rate of locking up those youths, in Juvenile Hall, the Monterey County Youth Center and in the state's youth prisons, remained high.

On the last day of 2010, the most recent date measured, Monterey County had the third-highest rate in the state of minors serving time in state youth prisons, only lagging behind Mono and Modoc counties. But because those counties' populations are so small — 14,000 and 9,500 — their numbers aren't very meaningful.

Among California's larger counties, Monterey's rate of sending youths to state facilities was the highest — nearly triple the state average.

The county's cost per arrest to taxpayers for housing those young offenders is also triple the state average, amounting to $15,485 per 1,000 youth arrests in 2010 compared with an average of $5,734 for other counties.

That trend, however, may be starting to reverse. Despite a rise in 2010, Monterey County's contribution to youth prisons has gone down since then, falling from 43 inmates in 2010 to 28 this year.

"I do know that we are having fewer youngsters committed to DJJ," Real said, adding that he expects the numbers to keep going down as more local services for youths take hold.

The current population in Juvenile Hall, which can hold up to 114 youths, is in the "mid-80s," Real said.

He credits new programs and increased use of alternatives such as electronic monitoring to keep incarceration rates down while focusing on rehabilitation.

"We have instituted an evening reporting center at Rancho Cielo (Youth Campus) instead of booking them into Juvenile Hall," he said. "We have the capacity of 14 (youths) right now, but it's going to expand."

Across California, fewer youths than ever are being sent to the Division of Juvenile Justice prisons, once known as California Youth Authority facilities.

The state's youth prison population has dropped 92 percent in the past 17 years, according to a study released last month, also from the San Francisco Bay Area-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.

In fact, the state has had to close a number of its youth facilities because of the dramatic decrease in prisoner populations.

Shift unexplained

Nationally, pinpointing the cause of the dramatic drop in youth crime rates has stymied criminologists and other experts. In California, the rate is now the lowest since statewide data began to be collected in 1954, and it fell by 20 percent during the past two years.

Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice researcher Mike Males found no connection between the decline in youth crime and incarceration rates, poverty levels or changes in the ways crime data is collected.

"While there are many theories regarding reasons for crime trends, none have been sufficient to explain the significant decreases in California's youth crime over the past 60 years," Males wrote.

Although youths today face conditions that crime researchers once believed would lead to higher crime rates, Males says young people "are engaging in less offending for reasons evidently tied to their own characteristics and times."

Only two factors may be contributors to the drop, although researchers aren't even sure how much influence they have. They are "the dramatic decline in youth arrests (due to) the relaxing of marijuana possession laws, and the improvement in economic well-being among young people in the state's poorest neighborhoods," the study said.

What the numbers also don't explain is exactly why Monterey County has been locking up more youths despite arresting fewer of them.

Although the area has been shown to have a high violent and serious crime rate among youths, Division of Juvenile Justice reports don't break down the type of offenses each of the county's young offenders is charged with.

General crime reports do show the county's youths are involved in more serious, violent crimes and lead the state in juvenile homicide rates.

· Use the online data mapping system: Results can be filtered by offense, race and gender. The interactive site also compares three-strikes cases, minors tried in adult courts, youths in foster care and poverty rates, as well as adult offender information.